After the Fall

Walking through the previously occupied town was one that gave the lonely man a chilled heart. He saw in it, his old life, the life he had once had, the life he had enjoyed, the life he had hated, the life he had loved so endearingly, the life that he had lived. All that was gone. All that had disappeared years ago, how many years? He could not tell, he had lost count after the fifth when he could find no calendars that continued further. He had once scoffed at calendars that extended further than the thirty-first of December for each year, but that calendar had been his most precious possession until it had abruptly stopped, leaving him with only a makeshift calendar on a wall that soon grew inaccurate and impossible to follow. He had kept that calendar until the very foundation of it just crumbled in his hands. He had been grateful for its existence and gave it an appropriate burial when its time had passed.

Now though it was a sunny day, one of the calmest he could remember even before the end of common existence as one knew it. The wind was blowing calmly, letting the trees sway gently and peacefully. The man enjoyed watching the trees doing their slow hypnotic dance. It was soothing and could help him to forget the world around him. He sat and watched and smiled to himself.

A rabbit came from out from behind a tree. It bounced into the clearing, stood on it’s hind legs and sniffed the air, it’s little front paws pulled into it’s chest and buck teeth protruding against the brown fur around it’s mouth. The man loved rabbits, they were not that hard to catch, but they could be slippery critters if they spotted him or he approached too slowly. They were tasty too. The man tried to remember if he had ever owned one before but could not recall anything other than the name “fluffy”. The man laughed, a harsh bark of a laugh that startled the rabbit into bounding off. The man coughed, surprised at his own outburst. For a time he had forgotten he could even make a sound from his mouth, he had not had to use it in so long. Now he was surprised to hear it actually work.

‘Hello?’ he croaked, and on hearing those words of old greeting he leant back and laughed up into a sky that was clear and wonderful and untainted.

He tried staring at the sun but could last only a few seconds. His eyes had grown stronger but even the sun was still too powerful for any mortal man to gaze upon. And that was just what he was. A mortal man, doomed to spend the remainder of his days withering away all by himself. The man had been a loner in normal life, preferring solitude most of the time but still enjoying company. He was not as such a hermit, but was used to and enjoyed his own company. Now though, he had an abundance of own time. For the man was the only person that he knew still to be alive. It was not that there was no one else out there, for there could quite easily be, but just that the man had never found another living human soul. Animals though, they were fruitful in their numbers, and it was always one of the man’s small comforts that he could watch each and every critter flourish and strive in a world that had no humans prematurely exterminating innocent creatures and running wroth with their self-proclaimed dominance. The man had even seen a score of frogs just the other day? week? month? hopping for wherever their destination lay. They seemed to have just come out of hibernation, and the man did admit that the air seemed to be warming up a little and it even smelled of spring anew, and the females were making for their pools of water while the lazy males waited in anticipation for the females in order to jump on their backs, hitch a ride, and maybe even get lucky.

But that was just one of things that the man was not bitter about after the world had ended. Where the human life had diminished and soon vanished, the wildlife had grown and expanded. No longer were cows and chickens locked in cages force fed steroid and antibody enhanced grain and food, but now they could live free lives wandering around and doing as they pleased. Foxes could roam the open without fear of being hounded down and shot for the sake of sport. Birds could excrete where they wanted without being labelled a vermin for just doing a natural occurrence. Bears could wander and raise their cubs without being locked up and their bile extracted to create something as simple as shampoo that humans had been coping without for thousands of years before its invention. Animals were in general doing the one thing that the majority of humans had taken for granted: enjoying life.

The man straightened up and cracked his back, stretching his stomach out to the sky. He scratched his overgrown and tangled beard, noting to find something sharp in order to shave with, and carried on walking down the wide street that once used to be a main road leading towards the crumpled and devastated city that was London. The road was overgrown with foliage that had forced its way through the lines of concrete via gaps smaller than the eyes could see. In places, the concrete sprouted up as though the roots had literally erupted like a volcano from the ground. The man knew this was not the case. It took years for this sort of movement to happen, not seconds. He had watched it occur outside his own home for years, every day going to see, but not disturb, how much the blocks of concrete moved from the pressure of nature.

It was a wonder that, just under the ground that thousands of cars used to drive along each and every day, that there could possibly be anything so magnificent and strong just urging to burst free. All around the man were trees great and small, shrubbery wide and thin, plants beautiful and blossoming. All this had once been neglected by humanity for transportation and making the quickest possible route for people to get to the work they hated, the place where they slaved away for eight hours a day, earning enough money for shareholders they neither knew nor had ever seen to enjoy their luxuries while earning just enough money for themselves in order to eat. In this that was the man’s own, he had to work no hours a day, for no one that he knew nothing of. He was his own man, and everything he did he did for himself. In this world all he had to think of was where his next meal would come from, which creature would succumb to the way of the world and perish in the natural way that life had originally intended.

The man was not hungry now so there was no need to feed. Instead he carried on down the street and towards what had once been an office building full of workers that would not leave their desks for most of the day until they were allowed to return home. Now though, the actual building was a shade of green where the foliage had stemmed up the walls and the growth had thickened to the size of a large man for each stem. Part of the building had collapsed and left a gaping hole in one of the corners that came down from the roof. In this gap the man could see the remnants of a workspace. The man decided he wanted to explore it.

The office was only three floors high and so the man went up to the front entrance and pushed the glass door open gently, not wanting it to break in his hands. Slowly and roughly it opened with the sound of rusted metal hinges grinding against each other. Just as the door was wide enough for the man to slip through he went in and stood looking around the main reception area. The surroundings were grimy with layers of dust and muck caked on all surfaces, and here and there were occasional footprints of animals that the man could recognise. Here was a rabbit’s tiny paws, the rabbit he had seen earlier? Possibly. There were the three-pronged feet of many birds more than likely made from when they were searching for scraps of food to survive on.

The man carried on and found a lift with its double doors stuck slightly open. He peeked inside but quickly drew away. Within the confines of the lift were a pile of bones that the man could easily tell had once formed the foundation of a human’s body. Had they become stuck within the lift and only managed to pry the doors open a mere inch or two? Why had they not attempted to escape the emergency exit hatch? Had they fallen and maybe broken a leg, thereby preventing any sort of escape? The man decided not to think about it and found the emergency fire exit stairs. Ascending the worn concrete his footsteps echoed throughout the hollow staircase, and he quickly became out of breath. It was funny that, after all these years of constant running and walking everywhere, he still struggled to climb a flight of stairs. It was just something about them that wore out a usually fit man quickly.

At the third floor he came into the main open office space and looked around. It was a layout that would have been standard when earth had still been running normally but now it was deserted, broken, and desolate. Most of the computers had been stolen during the early time of the end when thieves still believed that the authorities were going to right the happenings and when that happened they would have a shiny new working computer. Though if any of those thieves were alive now, they would certainly tell one that was not the case.

The man scooted round the work stations, the wooden parts decaying and the metal parts rusted, until he reached one near the broken wall. On this desk was still the remnants of an office worker’s tools: an empty in-tray, discarded mouse and keyboard, knocked over stationary holder with its pens and pencils spilled out like trailing guts. And beside all this was an upturned photo frame. The man picked it up and looked at the photo. He blew away the dust in a cloud. It depicted a summers day, a family picnic under the shade of a tree. There sat a father, mother, and their child who looked to be a girl of no more than ten. All three were looking at the camera, the smiles suggesting happiness was their sole emotion.

The man recognised the content family from somewhere but could not think where from. He knew their names… but what were they? He was not sure, they were on the tip of his tongue but he just could not quite remember them. Were they not… no, he could not remember, he was not sure that he did even recognise them and doubted his first thoughts.

A part of him wanted to keep the photo but another part, the survivalist part, was telling him not to. He could not tell why, but considering he had been listening to that voice for as long as he could now remember, and it had indeed saved his skin a number of times, he decided to chuck the frame and its photo out of the gaping hole in the wall and away. He waited and listened, and a few heartbeats later heard the faint cracking of the frame braking. He left the office and the building and carried on walking down the street that was once perpetually heavy with traffic.

He sniffed the air and could smell pleasant scents. The flowers were just coming into blossom all around him. Before, this would have been void of any flower-life and the smells would predominantly be that of engines and petrol clogging up the air. The cars that would have produced these foul odours were quite naturally no longer in use and the man had no mechanical skills in order to have ever attempted to use one. One was abandoned by the side of the road however and the man knew exactly what he would find in there. Nothing. It had already been ransacked though with some careful probing the man managed to pop the boot open. Inside he found a set of golf clubs, still in fairly good shape due to being locked away for so long. The man gave one of the clubs a practice swing and realised he had never played golf in his life. It would be pointless to take them with him, just another load of weight that would slow him down. He did enjoy collecting souvenirs however, he would have to make a note to come down another time to fetch these if he felt obliged to keep them.

Further on he heard the flow of a river to his right. It was only faint and in the distance but the recognition of it made him realise his thirst. He would have to be careful though just to make sure that the water was drinkable. God knew how difficult it was these days given that the pollution was not entirely washed out of all rivers and lakes wherever there was water to be found. It was slowly leaking away, that much was true, but the man had suffered illness a number of times from drinking foul water. The worst thing was he had no tools to steam it, let alone filter it. He needed to find replacement pots to cook in having used his old companions so thoroughly they literally fell apart in his hands.

He made it to the stream and found it to be only a shallow one, coming up to his waist or thereabouts. He knelt down on the bank, scooped a handful and sniffed it. It smelt suitable, usually the foul water would have a fungal stench making it obvious it was going to be the bringer of days of illness, but usually one could not tell. The man did this just as an ingrained precautionary measure. When satisfied, he drank the water and took three more mouthfuls, letting the stream cool him down from the blissfully warm day.

When he was ready he carried on but passed over the previously well-built roadway and up towards a hill that overlooked most of the surrounding area. He climbed this, careful of where he trod. His soles had become leathery and hard over the past few years like a hobbit’s — what are they again? — and could withstand many miles of hard walking, but anything sharp, as he was like to testify many times and more, could still cause a serious injury. He had once contemplated hacking off his own left foot when he stepped on a broken and rusted piece of metal but fear of the pain and lack of disinfectants and anesthetics made him shy away from doing the awful. He was grateful for his cowardice however as the infection did finally let up after a few weeks? months? years? and his foot did eventually heal, albeit with a slight limp left behind. Considering his ordeal, a foot that was unpleasant to look at and did not walk entirely properly, was better than no foot at all.

On top of the hill he gazed out onto the landscape below him and as always, marvelled at the sight. The sun was waning in the distance and he shielded his eyes with his hand like a cap. An orange glow was cast over the landscape like a blanket that engulfed its entirety. Here and there was vegetation growing and the man knew there would be a plethora of fruit coming into blossom and soon he would be able to walk amongst the plants and trees and pick any fruit he so desired without being shouted down for being on private property. This was one thing the man preferred about the end of the world. There was no restriction on just where he could go and what he could take. The world was open to him and there was no other man in a suit living in a country that was far away just for reduced taxes telling him he could not take just one or two apples even though he had not eaten in the past two days.

The man told himself to return there some time in the future to pick some of the juicy apples that made him slaver at just their imagining, maybe he would pick up the golf clubs at the same time. To the right of his view the broken path carried on for miles and in the distance the man could see what was left of London, the capital of England, and one of the greatest cities to ever have been developed and destroyed. Now though, it was a ruin, a magnificent ruin. The man had travelled there not long after the end had begun, in search of family and, almost as importantly, refuge. None had been found and he had stayed there, despite the governmental warnings not to occupy crowded areas, for a good few years while he was able to keep track of the days. Once the tracking had come to an abrupt stop, so had his stay in London. He had decided to venture out in search of other human life and to start again. The calendar had ended, and so his previous life had done so with it.

It was wonderful, he thought, how peaceful and serene the earth seemed when its creatures and plants worked in harmony. A score of birds swooped overhead, no danger of being struck down. They could fly where they wanted, eat what they wanted. Food was likely not in short-supply as the new growth of greenery would have brought with it an explosion of small creature life. Caterpillars, grasshoppers, beetles, all scurrying to and fro with no threat of their homes being taken down in order to construct a block of flats or a revolutionary new road that could shave as much as three seconds off commuter’s journeys a day.

All-in-all, the world the man was sole witness too, was one of absolute destructive beauty and serenity. Over time the species and races come and go, are born and die and fade from existence. They create and destruct, bring happiness and pain, joy and suffering. Each time there is a cycle, and whether it be the dinosaurs or the humans, each one joins the earth, and then leaves it once they think they have made their mark and made the earth theirs.

But this is not how the earth works. No matter how often a species tries to own the earth, to claim their share of land and make with it what they want, they will soon be ousted and their claim made redundant.

This is because of nature. In the end, nature will always overrule the species that tries to become the dominant thing on earth and enrich it with their own “beauty”, but the captivating sights of earth will destroy that which believes it is the greater. There is nothing greater to behold than that which is created by the earth.

That is the world that the man lived in. The man who knew his name but could not remember it, the man who knew people but could not remember them. He had lived in the world dominated by nature, and it was a beautiful one at that.

Nature…nature will also triumph.